


La Belle en Vous Aimant

by Kit



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode: s02e04 The Girl in the Fireplace, Episode: s04e011 Turn Left, Episode: s04e13 Journey's End, F/F, Gift Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-30
Updated: 2010-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-13 11:13:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit/pseuds/Kit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reinette watches as Rose forgets to turn left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Belle en Vous Aimant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PeroxidePirate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeroxidePirate/gifts).



**  
_La Belle en Vous Aimant_   
**

If my world is pressed together, mirror to wall, as a child with ragged hair and words across her chest once fumbled to say, then it is not so surprising that I have grown up to be watched.  I have just known different reasons.  I was ‘ _complete’_ to my Lord King long before thirty-seven. The caricatures, the mendicants , even my dearest friends would have me rise up from birth in the gold that graces me now, as if I had fashioned the clothes I wear from the bright air about me, and tell no one my secrets.  I am watched, by clock or man, and even by my Queen—she, perhaps, finds it easiest to keep her fine eyes upon me, the subtlest and sweetest of any audience. And none of them are quite sure, I think, if I gaze back. What else is power, but that question?

I have thirty-three years to me now, though I hope I am the only one to remember.  And the mirrors catch glimpses of her, sometimes.   A new gold, different from the frames, or the coloured alchemy of curtains, position, and sun. Flyaway and strange and unmistakable.  _Rose_. Inexact and imprecise, her hands moving too much, her hips—impossible not to notice!—holding her in a stance more confident than her words, or that soft, broken-vowel led rasp of a voice she has, as she tumbles the monsters out from under my bed.  

Not _all_ of that within the mirrors of Versailles, no. Impossible to disentangle my memories from these moments. “ _Cowboys have been running about in here,_ ” he said, and it had been _my head_ between his hands.  A strange word. There have many of them—I have yet to discover what some of their otherwise perfect French even means.  But _cowboy_ , I have taken to describe the clutter of my thoughts. To trace around their edges and bound them in.  It does not feel incomplete.

I have often watched her so. In memory or mirror-flash, or the slippery space between the two. She had the same hair in 1727, and so much _skin_ , as her body hunched and curled around to peer back at me, over the Doctor’s shoulder, untouched by flame.

(I was so very frightened. And she lingered. Just to ask if I were well.)

I must have my fireplace. It shall not be easy to move. But there are many more impossible things, after all.

***

When it happens, there are still scars of fresh plaster in the wall.

“Well. Um. _Yeah._ Must have taken the wrong the wrong left, then!”

More than a flash of her. The _body_ of her, before me and a barely-banked grate, and I am sure that this, unlike the other nightmares, must surely be my dreaming, since her face is changed. Her clothes have changed. This once, when there is no sound of clocks, she is older.  I step closer. Her eyes are dark, intent on my face, and something heavy is bound about her wrist. The faint blue glow is new. My own heart is not geared, there are no spokes, but I feel must be loud, still. She looks _surprised_.

“Sorry, Reinette, this isn’t exactly—I’m not—”

“ _I_ am not yet thirty-seven! You said that was time. Is _this_ time?”

She blinks at me. Her hair is longer, a little smoother, though she is dark at its roots and I cannot see those arms any more, covered as they are in something tight and smooth and black.  “I said that?”

 “Yes, you said that!” She is as strange as the child who had come before, so possessive and flighty and entranced, just a little, by every move I once made in a blush-purple gown that I still had, somewhere. I had worn to a different world, brief and terrible. It is not to be parted with.

“I _said_ that?” Rose whispers, her rasp-voice catching in her throat, my breath.  “In _this_ world, I said that?”

I close my eyes. Perhaps, when they open again, she will be gone back to dreams and I might wake from my own inanity. “ _I_ am the one limited to such a singular world as this,” I tell her, through the darkness behind my eyes.  “Take whatever proof that offers you.”

Rose takes my hands, instead. Hers are warm, and dry.  “Thank you,” she says. And then she laughs. “It’s not time yet, by the way. “

The silence, free of clocks, grows sweet. A nightmare slips under the bed once more.  I may breathe. And she stands so close now, I can feel, that my breasts brush hers, through the strange dark leather she wears like otherworldly skin. As I open my eyes—heavy with relief, and the confusion that chases that feeling still—I can see the garment has metal teeth right down the middle of it and her, bright and strange in my gilt-dazzled light. And I can see her skin, flushing as all skin does, when it is known that I watch. “That’s—”

“—that’s _good_ ,” she is laughing. “Trust me. That’s good. You’ve got enough to deal with when you’re thirty-seven. Now you can just be you. Stay the Pompadour; shag your King, his wife...do you _shag_ in French? I never bothered with A Levels.”

Inexact and imprecise. And incomprehensible. Cowboys are in my head.

 She swallows. “You look _really_ good, though. And if you’re here than I’m nearly at the right place. So I can go, and—”

“—don’t!” I do not expect to speak. Nothing makes sense and there is something more frightening in seeing this Rose age than in my own fate, my own incompleteness as I age before the mirrors in my palace.  She is laughing and flushed and there are curls of muted gold about her face, and a scent to her this close that is everything and nothing like I know, which fizzes around my head and flares deeper down, through heart and belly and thigh.  She is here, and she is laughing, heart-close and heart-close, and the monsters are not to get me yet. But she is more lost than before.  Her eyes tell me so. Her new clothes. There is less laziness in her body. “Don’t, Rose. Not yet.”

 She blinks. _You know my name?_ “I don’t think I have _ti_ —”

“Are there...cowboys running about in your head?”

“Um.”

I am a fool. The word is wrong. But it is still mine, and right for the darkness in her eyes. If The Doctor takes my monsters, what are hers? What wolves slaver and howl and leer at her feet, chasing her behind such a man? (Or into my new bedroom?)  I look at her and _think_ Bad Wolf, though I cannot say why. She still looks at me as if am utterly mad. It has always been easy, to watch her.

I try again. I take her face between my hands. As flesh and blood as any of my imaginary friends, visiting me in the rooms of my life. She gasps.

“Yeah?”

Her voice is distracting. “You sound as if you are rarely touched. That should not be true.” The words drift out from me, and I feel her heat beneath my palms.

“Been busy,” she mutters. Coughs. “ _Am_ busy, you know. I really need to—”

“—are you... _okay_?” Her old words, her old kindness from the one other time we have been this close. I try to reflect it back.

She smiles at that. A memory shared, quick and warm and her lips are full. I lean in, and there is barely air between us now. She does not pull back, and so I feel her words on my cheek, my throat. They slip beneath the tourmalines about my neck. “Dunno,” she says. “Scared to bits, really. But in the end—”

I kissed the Doctor because I wanted to. There is something good and right about kissing this girl the same way. I kiss her deep and true and my tongue in her mouth seems more than match for surprise or that look in her eyes as she moans, and I catch it. Catch and swallow down all the sounds she makes, as her hands rise and twine and I am pulled as fast as I am already holding her. She has my lip between her teeth, and her hair tickles my neck, and I laugh deep to feel her give and fall against me as I let my hands take full advantage of the strange, slight clothes these imaginary people wear, and let this body mould, complete, against my own.    




There are no clocks. No monsters. And the path is slow. Wicked. Finite.

Time.  


End file.
